I was reading a discussion over at Flickr the other day about how shooting in RAW mode saved some under-exposed shots. Accepted wisdom seems to be that correcting under and over exposure is much easier/better with RAW than JPG. Without making any judgments, I decided to try it out and see if it was true.

I can’t promise much (for now) other than that you’ll be writing for (and helping to build the audience of) a PR6 blog with about 1,000 regular readers. Do you have something interesting to say about photography and want to share it with a larger audience? I’m mainly interested in original content authored by you or at least an original opinion about something written elsewhere. Photodoto is not a re-blog or a news regurgitation service. Other than that, there are no time commitments, no minimums or maximums, post only when you’ve got something interesting to write about that has something to do with photography. Send email to john@photodoto.com if you’re interested.

Looking for a fun challenge? Are you committed? You’ll need to be if you want to participate in the 365 days challenge. The challenge is deceptively simple: Post 365 different self-portraits. One per day for an entire year.

The question “What does one do with 365 self-portraits?” comes to mind. You could pick the perfect one for a Warhol-esque pop photo. Or you could string them all together and make a 15 second time-lapse movie of your entire year. You could make a flip book. Or… or… then again, maybe it’s more about the journey than the end result. Anyway, looks like fun.

I finally entered the 21st century and bought an LCD monitor. There’s a lot of debate among photographers about color depth, gamut, and the like with LCD monitors. Most people agree that CRT monitors, properly calibrated, have better, more accurate color and uniform brightness than LCDs. These issues were on my mind as I shopped for an LCD. The trouble with CRTs, of course, is that they are ginormous, power-hungry beasts with color convergence and geometry issues—if you can even find a shop with a decent selection. My old 21″, 72 pound, 1998 vintage Cornerstone CRT was showing it’s age.

I ended up buying a 20.1″ Samsung SyncMaster 204B. It’s a 24-bit panel which means it’s only capable of showing 16.7 million colors (rather than 32-bit “true” color). It’s also true that brightness is not completely uniform across the entire panel and the brightness (and color) shifts slightly as you look at the screen from different positions.

But does it really matter? In my experience, practically, no. When you are seated in front of the monitor, those issues evaporate. If you sit on the floor looking up at your desk or you like to operate your computer from two feet to either side then you might have problems. Photographs on my LCD, to my eye, look just as good as they did on my CRT, with one caveat: because the digital image from the LCD is so sharp and crisp, I see JPG compression artifactseverywhere that I never noticed before on my analog CRT.

My impression is that a lot of the problems people talk about when they discuss the merits of CRTs over LCDs are ghosts from the LCD’s past. In early models, all of these problems were much more pronounced and the LCD gained a bad reputation which has stuck but which is now much less deserved. Modern LCD panels are getting better and better. And for most photographers, will do the job just fine.

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America. — http://pollingplacephotoproject.org/

Join our email course “7 Days to Earning More Asa Photographer” and learn:Tech tips that will save you $2.5K onequipmentWhy bad photographers make moremoney than youMistakes every beginner makes andhow to avoid them... and much more!